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A Plea for Peaceful Coexistence

Beer is beer and wine is wine, and I love them both. My column this week is about stout, the dark ale that belies its name by being, in most of its incarnations, surprisingly light and refreshing.

But that’s not what I want to talk about right now. I want instead to ask why beer and wine are so often pitted against each other. I ask this question not to portion out blame, but to point out an absurdity.

Beer and wine are not in competition. Yet people in the wine business, who I assure you drink an awful lot of beer, don’t often take it seriously as a beverage. And people in the beer business, perhaps in reaction to not-so-imaginary slights, rarely even acknowledge the existence of wine, much less deem it worthy of drinking.

Sure, there are exceptions. Garrett Oliver, the brewmaster at Brooklyn Brewery and one of the country’s foremost advocates for the greatness of beer, is a wine lover. And I know people in the wine industry who are every bit as discerning and analytical about beer as they are about wine.

The irony is that great beer and great wine are on the same team. The enemy of beer is not wine and the enemy of wine is not beer, just as the enemy of bread is not fruit and vice versa. But the enemy of good beer and good wine, and good food in general, is bad beer, bad wine and, yes, bad food.

What unites this team is the striving for real wine, real beer, and real food, as opposed to cynical product. That is the problem, and I think most people realize this no matter what they say or do. Craft beer’s battle is not against wine but against decades of cynical marketing from the giant breweries, which have done everything possible to portray beer drinkers as asinine fools. The enemy of good wine is the atrocious marketing that makes wine an aspirational commodity, just another luxury good to purchase for its status value. That has to offend the reverse snob in all of us.

Fellow wine lovers, fellow beer lovers, unite! We shall not permit ourselves to be pitted against one another. Do not be fooled by false choices. You do not have to choose beer or wine. Just good or bad.